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3 Jan 2018

Top 4 Reasons Companies Won't Fix Their Database Issues

When I consult at a company, I aim to identify issues with their database and give options on how to solve them.
However, sometimes implementing those solutions may be a more lengthy process than it needs to be and sometimes they may not be implemented at all. During my career, I have observed some reasons as to why that might happen within organizations.

Obviously, the following observations will never happen at your company. I am just writing about them so that you might notice them in other places.

1. Legacy code

People don't like to have anything to do with legacy code. It’s painful. It’s difficult. It’s risky to change. It runs business critical functions. Worse of all, they didn’t write it. This can be a problem as often, the most cripling database issues require changes to legacy code.

2. New Technologies or Methods

People don’t like you to introduce any new technologies they don’t want to learn and maintain. Not even different methods in technologies already being used. No fancy upgrades to the DB server, no new load balancers and certainly don’t start using SQL statements in the code over their existing ORM.

3. Old Technologies or Methods

In a complete polar opposite, people in tech organisations don’t like you to introduce boring technologies. What would be the point of introducing boring (yet tested) technologies when they could be playing around with shiny new ones. There is a caveat to this - groups prefer it when other groups they depend on (let’s say developers depend on ops) choose to use boring and tested technologies. Just not for themselves. And vice versa.

4. Management Involvement

Last, but certainly not least, no one from upper management will get involved in resolving these issues and push forward solutions. No project/product manager/agile-coach will be assigned to chase up issues. As far as they are concerned, this is an engineering issue and as engineers, you need to sort it out yourselves. Only 'change requests' from the business, have managers around it.

Final Thoughts

After some years of analysing database systems for performance issues, I am finally realising that I should also analyse human systems for performance issues.